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Hello everyone! I hope your week has been going well! It’s almost Friday!

Last weekend I got to go home, and on Sunday after church my family went on a picnic and hike to Oil Creek State Park. This park is unique because part of it is the site of an old ghost town, Petroleum Centre.

The town itself is gone and replaced with beautiful woods. But some traces remain, like the cemetery, train tracks, one house, some foundations, and the front step of what used to be the bank.

This town has been a very familiar place for me since my childhood. My parents took us on hikes up mountains and through forests when I was as young as five. It’s been fascinating to grown up learning about the history of the place. Ghost towns in general are just so haunting. Petroleum Center was a booming center of the oil industry (as its name suggests), but the thing about boom towns is that they become ghost towns. The place was founded in the mid 1860s and mostly abandoned less than ten years later.

This front step is captivating to me. Think about all the history, all the life this thing has seen (assuming rocks have eyes). Think about the men who wiped their boots on it, the women who swirled their skirts on it, and the children who played on it. That’s pretty darn cool. So here’s a poem that this front step inspired.

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Published by Hannah Kennedy

Hannah is an old lady at heart, with a deep love of yarn and floral patterns. She has curly hair, she is a lefty, she googles everything, and her favorite color is blue. She can usually be found reading everything from nineteenth-century fiction to modern psychology, doing yoga, dragging out chores to fit the podcast she's listening to, or watching The Office with her husband.
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